Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

First time accepted submitter JDG1980 writes "According to CNET and various other sources, CS6 will be the last version of Adobe's Creative Suite that will be sold in the traditional manner. All future versions will be available by subscription only, through Adobe's so-called 'Creative Cloud' service. This means that before too long, anyone who wants an up-to-date version of Photoshop won't be able to buy it – they will have to pay $50 per month (minimum subscription term: one year). Can Adobe complete the switch to subscription-only, or will the backlash be too great? Will this finally spur the creation of a real competitor to Photoshop?"

I'd heard that Adobe had just recently stopped selling their products on CD/DVD's and only had downloadable. I don't really like that as that I really prefer to keep physical install media, but I can live without if need be.

But, renting software, is unacceptable to me.

What happens after awhile if for some reason, I can't or don't wish to connect said computer to the internet to check in? I just go dark and that's acceptable?

Where's the incentive to improve the software on a subscription model? Once they have your money they can just sit around without adding new features, or add features nobody really wants, or...basically whatever they feel like doing. There's no pressure at all to make new versions which are good enough to make people part with more many.

And where's the money to develop new versions coming from? They have to find ways of forcing people to upgrade to pay for the development cost. This way they don't have to think as much about older versions as they can just render them obsolete knowing that everybody will be updating.

For professional users a subscription makes a lot of sense, I'm just baffled as to why they aren't leaving the amateurs alone here. That being said, I wouldn't necessarily mind paying for a software subscription if I got to kee

We're already seeing the usual rip-off pricing for non-US customers: Creative Cloud is currently just shy of £50/month in the UK, which works out at about two years to break even compared to the current advertised price for buying the key applications in CS6 outright (a little under £1,200).

I don't want to have my UI move around arbitrarily. I hate it when browsers do that. I hate it when mobile apps do that. I use Creative Suite to earn a living, and I won't tolerate those kinds of tools doing it.

I don't want to work more in the cloud. I have invested a considerable amount of money in building a high performance system here, with robust storage, networking, back-ups etc. And my system and devices don't trust anyone outside my company with access to material I'm working on for clients.

And most of all, I don't trust Adobe not to screw me. When my boot drive failed, they were the only company whose DRM couldn't figure it out and reinstall cleanly after the replacement was installed. It took weeks (and their tech support people who could barely speak English or understand the problem calling me literally in the middle of the night and then wondering why I wasn't impressed, and ultimately the first step toward formal legal action) to get them to fix the problem. As far as I can tell, that problem turned out to be due to completely fictional records somehow magically becoming linked to the serial number of our legitimate, legal copy of the product in their database, which sounds a lot like either an admin screw-up or someone's key generator coincidentally hitting our number, but certainly no fault of ours either way.

I predict with 100% confidence that none of my companies will be giving any more money to Adobe if they go ahead with this. They aren't trustworthy, their pricing model is predatory, and their track record of improvements/bug fixes -- or rather the unspectacular lack thereof -- doesn't speak well of how much value any of us are going to get out of renting our software. If we need more copies of CS for new people, we'll just source legal but second-hand permanent copies of the same version we've already got, as the courts in Europe seem happy that we are perfectly entitled to do.

It seems you don't understand how this model works. I have been operating with Creative Cloud for over a year now and it's nothing like you've described.

I don't want to have my UI move around arbitrarily.

Don't click the update button then... no one is forcing you to take the updates, you're just a luddite if you don't.

I don't want to work more in the cloud. I have invested a considerable amount of money in building a high performance system here, with robust storage, networking, back-ups etc. And my system and devices don't trust anyone outside my company with access to material I'm working on for clients.

I still burden my "high performance system" every day, and even expanded my system to take advantage of the new RayTracing features in After Effects with great results. The software runs locally it's just licensed in the cloud.

Oh theres another huge benefit... the license is platform agnostic. So for the artist who has Windows and Apple they don't have to get screwed by buying two completely different software packages that never stay in sync.

If you can predict anything with 100% confidence it is that you don't know as much as you think you know.

Don't click the update button then... no one is forcing you to take the updates, you're just a luddite if you don't.

The Luddites were against improvements in technology that would save lots of effort, increase efficiency, and therefore potentially make them redundant. I see no evidence that any recent "upgrades" in Creative Suite have had that kind of effect. They do seem fond of redoing their entire UI theme every couple of years, but there haven't been any must-have new features that were of more than niche interest for quite a while.

And that's the biggest problem with this whole scheme. We're talking about a pricing model where you basically have to pay the equivalent of full price every couple of years. Even on the old, one-off purchase model with a substantial up-front price, you only paid that once and you paid a much lower price if you wanted to upgrade to the next version. Something that is going to work out that much more expensive, not to mention having the risk of breaking at least once a month, has to have something serious in it for the market to make them want to shift, and I just don't see that happening given Adobe's track record lately. As the likes of Microsoft have found out recently, there is always at least one viable alternative for large, profitable customers who don't like your new offering: stick with the old one they already have.

>>You are now stuck on the current version of PS
So what? I use CS2 and while some of the new toys are cool, they're still just toys. There a some tools that might make my workflow a little faster, but nothing that is revolutionary. Certainly nothing that's worth the cost.
Also, the OP isn't betting his company on luck/hope. The software he purchased works. So where's the bet?

I'm all for investing in the best tools and practices. However, your entire argument is predicated on the newer versions of Creative Suite applications actually having that added value. Presumably for some people they do, but I've yet to see a single feature advertised since we last upgraded around CS5 time that seems likely to help us significantly with any of the work we do, in any of the CS applications we use regularly.

So in our case, your argument is apt but backwards. Instead of paying a few thousand

On the contrary, I'm betting it on keeping our situation under our own control and making rational purchasing decisions based on expected ROI and watching the bottom line.

I hope you wont suffer from feature envy when the newest whiz bang features get released for PS

Well, we haven't so far, we so we'll take our chances, thanks.

FWIW, I hope you won't suffer from purchase envy if the newest whiz bang features turn out not to be so whizzy after all when there's no longer any meaningful incentive to improve the product and the subscription fees are up 50% in a year or two anyway. Which of our hypothetical futures do you think will be closer to reality?

I was a buying Adobe Creative suite and updating for a while, but their business model is now simply too predatory for my tastes. I'll wait for others now with an incentive to build similar, but much cheaper software. I and I suspect most users don't use more than 20-30% of the functionality in the suite as it is. Why pay to rent something you are not going to use?

The real problem with renting software is essentially that you are locked in. Once you stop paying, your software "goes away". They have zero incentive to let you stay using older versions, so expect once they lock in the market, the window to upgrade before you are shut out will grow shorter, while the price to rent grows larger. You can see this already in their price increases over the past few years. This year it will be $600/yr, the next $700 and so on. Count on it.

Looks as if Adobe is giving other software vendors a real incentive to displace them in all but the high end niche of the market.

You have no choice. What are you going to do, stop using Photoshop? I don't think so.

There are plenty of choices - some only perform a subset of the work that photoshop does, but for many professionals that will be enough. Some examples:

For many professional photographers, Lightroom (available separately) provides better tools for photo manipulation and cataloging.For many image manipulators, other software like Pixelmator or Seashore/GIMP would provide enough control at a fraction of the price. It's missing some features like layer styles, but it has the basics, and comparing 'cloud' pricing to buying and owning software would make many people consider living with the lost features.For many designers, they don't need the many features of photoshop and would be happy with more basic tools for image adjustments.For many illustrators, a tool like Inkscape might be a better fit

Adobe could very easily lose this market within a few years - they've already lost the trust of most of their professional customers, and for many this move will be the last straw. It's a gift for their competitors, this is the perfect time for them to step up a gear and poach a lot of the userbase of Adobe software. I know I'll be looking at competitors with renewed vigour and am not in any way interested in subsidising Adobe's middle-managers with a monthly subscription. The CS suite in general as become more bloated, and less user-friendly with every release, and Creative Cloud is a joke - as a customer I have *zero* interest in automatic updates from Adobe, and I want to be in control of when I give them money - as do many huge institutional buyers/customers - many skip versions for example if the features are not compelling enough. This quote from the OP sums up my attitude to them (as a current customer) too:

They aren't trustworthy, their pricing model is predatory, and their track record of improvements/bug fixes -- or rather the unspectacular lack thereof -- doesn't speak well of how much value any of us are going to get out of renting our software.

The lack of backwards/forwards compatability in their file formats is also an issue which illustrates the contempt they hold their customers in - it's a blatant attempt to force upgrades (as is Creative Cloud) - there is nothing in it for customers, so why should they play along?

I remember a little over a decade ago Adobe came from nowhere to own the desktop publishing market with InDesign, against an entrenched challenger which had a virtual monopoly at the time (Quark) - nowadays Quark software is the legacy software which everyone loves to hate and hardly anyone uses, and InDesign is the incumbent, that happened very quickly over the space of 5-10 years. They won because their software was better, they listened to customers, and they built a great product which had features (like transparency) that customers had been crying out for. The contrast to the Adobe of today could not be more marked.

The near monopoly they have on image manipulation can easily change, and I suspect it will, as Adobe have already lost touch with their customers, and are adding all sorts of crap to their products and switching the UI round every year (as a professional user, I wish they'd take half the features out, and focus on making them rock solid and performant). They've started to see their customers as a cash-cow too stupid to look at competition, and that's very dangerous for them - sure they'll coast for the next decade on old customers too lazy to upgrade and repeating revenue fro upgrades, but they've started the downhill slide of spending more effort on wringing money out of customers than on making good products.

I remember a little over a decade ago Adobe came from nowhere to own the desktop publishing market with InDesign, against an entrenched challenger which had a virtual monopoly at the time (Quark)... The contrast to the Adobe of today could not be more marked.

They won because they came to market with a fully-functional new product that had no legacy holdovers, and most importantly ran on OSX. Quark was refusing to build an OSX version of their product, completely alienating their core customer base. Of course it also helps that InDesign could be bundled with and integrated well with Photoshop and Illustrator, which almost every Quark user had running on their desktop as well. Adobe's previous product in the marketplace (PageMaker) had long since died off.

Or how about this one.. Somebody with lots of $$$ (or lots of backers with $$$$) decides to get with the GIMP crew and fund them to develop/add to GIMP the features/tools that make professional users of Photoshop stick with Photoshop, even though GIMP has, what? 80% of the features of Photoshop?? These somebodies who perhaps are fed up with Adobe and its bullshit antics, and wants to give them a comeupance???? It would be fun to watch...

As nice as it sounds in a "rooting for the little guy" kind of way, I don't see the GIMP being any sort of serious Photoshop challenger in the future. It's a geek's project for geeks.

I'm not a huge believer in the power of FOSS communities to create focussed, high quality products. FOSS has had a few big success stories, but as a movement it enjoys most of its success when producing "good enough" clones of what commercial software does that cater to non-power users and don't come with all the nasty costs an

Because amateurs don't buy CS. Amateurs don't drop the thousands of dollars that Adobe charges for CS on a photo editor. They use Elements, an alternative, or pirate it.

I think Adobe is shooting themselves in the foot with this one. The professionals will keep using CS and the amateurs will use old versions until they stop working and then switch to something else. The something else will get better (there are already a LOT better alternatives than they were a few years ago). Eventually Adobe will have

There won't be a $499 student version. Our department is flipping out - if you think the small fry designer is getting screwed on this, it ain't nothing compared to academia seat licensing. The last I heard was Adobe wants to shake us down for $587,000 ***A YEAR***.

We feel screwed. Pros use Adobe software, but where the fuck are we going to get the $$$ for that? The administration is saying they want to download the expense to the departments. That would be catastrophic to our already stretched budgets. My guess is we'll bite the bullet for a year while we scramble to find alternatives. Photoshop will be hard to get around...

If you have 3,000 design students who are paying $30,000 a year in tuition then your program is pulling in 3,000 * 30,000 = $90,000,000 in tuition. I think you can afford 0.5% of your budget to go to Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Audition and Illustrator for you

The incentive is to keep that flow of cash coming in. The pressure will be from other companies who feel they can offer a competing product at a more compelling price point, and take away Adobe's business.

Or did you really think once you signed up for a subscription, you were committing to pay $50 a month in perpetuity?

Actually I'd say the opposite. If I put down $500 once, I have that version. Patches and similar free updates don't sell me another copy or make the company any money. The only way to get more money out of me is to sell another major revision.

In a SaaS model (i.e. subscription method) I can jump ship in 6 months to another product with better products/features/updates and not lose my whole investment. Instead, if I'm paying the company monthly they have a very strong motivation to continue improvement.

I'd say a lot of Adobe CS users are just as locked to Adobe's software as Windows users many times are.

However, this could change quickly if someone decided to put a lot of effort (and money) into developing a viable alternative to Adobe's software (especially Photoshop, while there are currently alternatives on the market Photoshop is definitely the baseline that other software is compared to).

I really wouldn't mind if say, Apple and Autodesk both decided to take a stab at creating their own Photoshop comp

There are already a lot of smaller competitors to Photoshop, at least for photographic work.

The main one From Apple itself is Aperture. It's not really a photoshop competitor exactly, but where it does become one is the range of plugins that support it now - pretty much most of the powerful image editing tools have Aperture plugins, so I can do fairly advanced editing in Aperture without ever touching Photoshop.

I always bought Photoshop before because it was still useful in some cases, but don't see any ne

The main one From Apple itself is Aperture. It's not really a photoshop competitor exactly, but where it does become one is the range of plugins that support it now - pretty much most of the powerful image editing tools have Aperture plugins, so I can do fairly advanced editing in Aperture without ever touching Photoshop.

Aperture is competitive with Adobe's Lightroom, not Photoshop. Neither program supports even basic features like layers, which are necessary for many types of graphical manipulation work. Instead, they're meant as the first step of the workflow for raw image files that have just been taken off the camera.

I have never known a release of creative cloud subscription CS apps to stay working 100% for *anybody* for several months at a time, let alone a whole year. From Internet outages, adobe's abysmal registration and support, to paying but finding day or week long delays until the apps actually detect registration is valid. I gave up after less than a year and bought cs6 in February this year.

And I'm a total adobe fan otherwise.

What the hell are adobe thinking? Of ways to make sure their apps are pirated even h

Adobe underestimates how much it benefits from piracy. If poor college students can't cut their teeth on the full Adobe suite, they're likely to learn how to use something else. When those students go out and get jobs, they're more likely to use what they're used to than drop a bundle on Adobe software they've never used before.

I wouldn't be surprised if those poor college students get their Adobe suite indoctrination as part of their tuition and fees. Maybe at an educational discount, but nowadays, who knows and why would it matter? Just add another $5k to your undergrad student loan debt!

As to jobs... again, if a workplace needs CS, they'll pay the monthly license (per-seat, probably) as part of their operating cost. It's going to work out a lot like leasing computer hardware instead of buying it and then disposing of it when it needs to be upgraded.

As much as I really prefer the model of "one up-front payment, perpetual license" (as close to "buying" as you can get with proprietary software), the idea of software lease MUST be irresistable to SW vendors. Steady cashflow, inherent anti-piracy (if a cloud-based online-heavy implementation), separation of feature developent and marketing plans...well, maybe not so much that one. Time will tell.

Adobe underestimates how much it benefits from piracy. If poor college students can't cut their teeth on the full Adobe suite, they're likely to learn how to use something else. When those students go out and get jobs, they're more likely to use what they're used to than drop a bundle on Adobe software they've never used before.

Guess what? They'll give it college students for free, or real cheap and then when they pull the plug after 4 years they have a new paying user. Piracy, who needs it when you can hook them and then withdraw the drug until they pay?

It is a challenging proposition: force customers to rent and provide no option to own. This is a natural fit for services, but becomes rather odd for a commodity. It is hard to understand how, in the consumer market, a company can successfully force a customer to pay for a service that they don't use: if I only use Photoshop in March and June, why on earth should I pay for April and May? Subscription models work very well in business, particularly in large organizations, but this will be interesting to watch unfold in the consumer market.

I doubt it'll spur competition, because everyone will just stick with CS6.

I'm not a multi media production expert, but CS6 seems to be pretty feature complete, and if you ever wanted to go further than that, there is always Processing or max/msp, and third party plugins for After Effects, Premeire, and Photoshop.

I've used Paint Shop Pro any time I needed to do anything that Paint couldn't handle. I'm just curious what advanced users are getting out of Photoshop that seems to make it the go-to editor for power users.

Paint Shop Pro and about a dozen other Windows-based graphics applications have been offering 90% of Photoshop's features for well over a decade now.The remaining 10% is mostly color and print management, which most people neither need nor know even exists.

Sadly, the common answer to Photoshop around these parts is "Gimp".Anybody who's ever used Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Painter, Canvas, Photo Draw will be thoroughly disappointed by Gimp's lack of features and especially it's utter lack of usability.

My guess is this is a move to combat widespread piracy among home users. The benefit to home user's pirating your software is that people get to know your product, and then want to use it at work. That's one of the big reasons why MS has turned a blind eye to small time home piracy. Those home users aren't going to pay a $200+ license (or a $50/month subscription) so allowing them to pirate doesn't equate to a lost sale, it encourages companies to stick with a product their workforce is familiar with, and it ultimately get the vendor sales through those companies.

Basically I think they may be shooting themselves in the foot, but not in the way the summary implies. The companies who buy adobe products probably aren't going to baulk at the switch (and in fact a subscription makes things easier on start-ups since they don't have the overhead of a much more expensive license). It's going to hurt them because there will likely be less people familiar with their product in/entering the workforce. They can offset that somewhat by giving it away/giving heavy discounts to education sectors, but at the end of the day if the person can't fire it up on their home computer free/cheap it's going to make a difference.

I know two people that use photoshop and *always* eventually upgrade to the latest version within a year or two (stupid fanatics; no offense). I can tell you right now that neither of them is going to stand for this and one of them is definitely going to send Adobe one or more very scathing emails to tell them that he will never buy anything of theirs again and to explain to them how they are a bunch of idiots making a very stupid mistake (and is highly likely to call them up in person and yell at them to

The really interesting part of this seems to be that Adobe gets to keep all the money from the licensing. Previously, if you wanted a license, you'd go to some reseller, and they'd get part of the money, as would a distributor, and maybe ever a couple other companies along the way. This is basically a game changer. Adobe believes (and it's probably true) that it's popular enough that they don't need resellers and other people pushing their products, and that they can do good enough business just selling direct to the end user. As much as I like the idea of subscription software, I do like the idea of the middle man being cut out, since most of the time they offer very little value to the end customer, and can only really make prices higher, or at the very best, bleed out money from the process would have been better served going back to the people creating the product. It's the equivalent of music labels selling directly to end users without going through the music stores (be they online or physical stores/records)

I've seen boxed copies of Adobe software subscriptions on sale at Staples. Maybe eventually they'll only sell them through an application marketplace or online, but that doesn't seem to be the plan for the near future.

Uhm no. Customers are idiots. Witness what the videogames industry has manged to get out of videogamers.

The videogame industry mostly sells to teenage boys. You can get away with a lot more when you're selling an entertainment product to kids than when you're selling a business product to other businesses.

Uhm no. Customers are idiots. Witness what the videogames industry has manged to get out of videogamers.

The videogame industry mostly sells to teenage boys. You can get away with a lot more when you're selling an entertainment product to kids than when you're selling a business product to other businesses.

Businesses will dismiss it as the cost of doing business. $50 is a tiny fraction of what a graphic designer costs them every year.

I've had a full PS license for years, currently on CS6. But my need for it is very much less than my preference for maintaining my own software and update schedules, and avoiding recurring costs. It will therefore be the last.

This means that before too long, anyone who wants an up-to-date version of Photoshop won't be able to buy it – they will have to pay $50 per month (minimum subscription term: one year).

This pricing seemed off. Sure enough, TFA:

For those who don't want the entire suite, Adobe offers subscriptions to individual programs. And now they're cheaper, down from $20 a month to $10 a month, Morris said.

So if you want Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. etc., the suite will be $50/mo. If you only want Photoshop, it's $10/mo. Furthermore, if you really only need software for a month, you can rent the suite for $75.

I can't say I'm a big fan of subscription only (even MS is keeping some purchase options for Office), but pricing like this does create some winners (besides Adobe). Short term projects, for example, may benefit from being able to purchase what was a $2500 package for only a month or two at $75/month. The losers, of course, are those that purchase upgrades infrequently and use their software for years.

Frankly, I'm tempted by $10/mo for Illustrator. The retail box of CS6 is $540, and I have no product from which to upgrade. So for the cost of the boxed version (with its potential resale or upgrade value factored in), I get 4 1/2 years of use of the latest version. One key difference is I can easily drop it after 1 year (and $120), if I don't need it any more. Still, I understand how abandoning box sales will make some people unhappy.

My wife is a budding professional photographer, and my son is highly creative and in middle school. Both get a lot of use out of Photoshop, but we can barely afford one permanent license. It's a purchase I'm willing to make only because it opens up future opportunities for both of them.

But if Adobe's going to want about that same amount of money every year, I just don't see how we can justify the cost. We might have to suck it up and hope we can get the same functionality with a collection of much cheaper / free tools.

I think this is a great opportunity for the Open Source Community to showcase what really can be done with apps like The GIMP. There is admittedly work to be done for vector apps, but they are coming along....
Other than using Photoshop specific filters, there really isn't anything Photoshop can do that I can't do in GIMP... Why pay Adobe for their overpriced bloatware?

One: how many people actually purchase Photoshop *now*? Aren't like 99.999% of all photoshop installs pirated?

Two: to those rare people who do actually purchase Photoshop, how many of them would have any need for whatever would be in hypothetical new versions, as opposed to just using the one they already have a copy of?

When I purchase software, it counts as a capital expense against my cost center. If, however, I enter into a rental agreement of this sort, it counts as an expense against my cost center. This will more or less mean that departments will no longer be able to obtain Adobe software since we're constant under pressure to keep operating expenses down. The software is no longer an amortizable asset, but instead gets counted as overhead (not to mention, this sort of licensing scheme incurs overhead in its own right to manage).

The practical upshot is that this makes Adobe products far more expensive for a company, and far less desirable overall.

How KIND of Adobe for this wonderful offer. I will be amongst those people falling over themselves to pay for a product which gives them less than 2 years use when before it would've lasted a lifetime. Thanks also go to Microsoft for leading the way into this sparkling new future with their newly branded Office 360 software.

New frontiers are being explored here. I dream of a world where we can play with cute 'apps' like Photoshop brimming with DRM goodness in the 'Creative Cloud' on a single-screen metro GUI using the laggy touchscreens of our tablets. Glory!

The good is the additional options (not explained in the summary). $75 per month to rent the software is nice if you just need it for a quick project but don't want the buy the whole thing. $10 a month is reasonable for one of the programs assuming you usually buy the latest version. In fact, the $50 a month is probably a great deal if you usually buy the latest version anyway.

However, this destroys is the ability to invest in a product for a one-time fee and then get as much use out of that project as you can. For example, suppose you purchased Photoshop CS4 for $700 when it was released (October 2008) and found that it suited your needs just fine. As the upgrades came, you evaluated them and didn't think you needed any of the new features. So you kept using your Photoshop CS4 license as CS5 and 6 came out.

For 4 1/2 years, you haven't needed to budget money every month for an upgrade to the software. With the subscription-only model, though, it would rapidly need to become a line item on anyone's budget. If too many software products did this, it would limit how many programs people would buy. Spending $$$ for software once every few years is something people can manage. (Use the older version longer if times are lean, upgrade if money is flowing nicely.) Spending $50 a month for each piece of software you use would quickly become a huge financial burden on most people.

My last Adobe upgrade (CS5) cost me $650 and has served me well for 3 years. CS6 at $50 a month will cost me $3600. I do get a discounted initial rate, but this is only guaranteed for a year.
I only hope they get the backlash they deserve, at least from the larger prepress companies. The older pros I know don't like this, but the younger designers don't really know anything else and it allows them to come into the program with less money upfront.
I see CS5 being viable for a long time.

It seems there's a lot of confusion as to what the Adobe Creative Cloud is. I currently subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud at the $50 per month rate. Here's what I get...

Adobe CS6 Master Collection-- Everything, not just Photoshop-- Usually around $2600 when purchased as a standalone program
-- At $50 per month, I could only upgrade every 4 1/3 years
-- But I get continuous updates-- I can install ACC on two computers
-- One can be OSX and the other Windows
-- You can't do this with purchased apps-- Apps are installed locally
-- Don't have to be online to use apps
-- Unless you're past the current expiration of your subscription-- Data files are stored locally
-- Don't have to use cloud storage

I've been in the design industry going back to Photoshop 5. This well before there was such a thing as Creative Suite, before Adobe bought Macromedia and before Quark made such a mess of their desktop publishing application that everyone switched to InDesign.

Adobe has a complete monopoly on the design industry. In the US I've never come across a designer that doesn't use Adobe products. Using anything else is a surefire way to be ostracized and struggle to find a job. Overseas, where Adobe software tends to be more expensive, and design culture isn't as entrenched in a particular mindset as it is in the US, you sometimes saw other software used. But it was rare and most who couldn't afford Creative Suite just pirated it. Often, the best case was that they'd get a single license and then crack it for use on multiple machines.

In the US, the design industry has screwed itself. They've collectively deemed that Adobe software is The One Way (tm) to do design. You're not a real designer if you work any other way. Making things worse is that like a pack of suckers, they'd rush out to upgrade the instant the next version was released. Adobe's model of preventing backwards compatibility meant that if you resisted upgrading within a few months you'd find yourself receiving design files you can't open. Flash, for example, went from plenty of options when saving in the Macromedia days to allowing you to save back a single version. Whether or not your files feature new functionality is irrelevant.

So the end result is that you're dragged along on the upgrade cycle whether you like it or not. But the most frustrating bit here is that the vast majority of designers never touch what new functionality Adobe has introduced. But then most of that functionality has very limited utility for most people. And while there have been some valuable updates through the years there have been core issues that have yet to be addressed. One is how the UI amongst the various apps is inconsistent despite Creative Suite now having been around for at least 10 years. One of the more ridiculous issues is how most apps in the package, including Acrobat, lack support for retina display.

Knock Microsoft and Office all you want, but they've always been good about updates, their UI is consistent across all apps, and they supported retina early on. On top of that, you can still work effectively with an old version of Office. And most important of all, they don't have a monopoly on any industry.

They will have to learn the hard way. In the supply vs. demad sense, their supply of greed is without limits while the demand certainly has limits.

GiMP should be looking more and more attractive to professionals as this sort of thing goes. All the other bits and pieces of creative suite needs replacement too but not being made by the same maker isn't all that bad so long as their formats are standards compliant and readable amongst one another. I've used Inkscape and loved it though Illustrator has some

Yea, it isn't a professional grade graphics tool unless you paid an obscene amount of money for it.

Obscene? $49.99 per month? Most people pay twice that per month for Cable.

If you're a graphic designer you can get by with just the creative suite for all of your software needs. That works out to about 31 cents per hour for Adobe software. You're probably charging your client $50-$100 per hour. So that means the software which enables your entire business to run is as little as 0.3%-0.6% of your billable rate.

Credit card servicing fees are 2.5% of a retail business' overhead. So to all the whining I just yawn. Does Creative Suite offer 31 cents an hour in value? Of course. The reason you won't see any backlash is because Creative Suite is ridiculously cheap even on subscription. @ $2.5 per day, it only has to save you $2.5/$75hr * 60 = 2 minutes of productivity per day. Using photoshop probably saves me 2 *hours* of productivity per day over gimp. It definitely saves me 2 minutes. So I could stop paying Adobe and lose 2 hours of productivity per day... or I could pay Adobe the equivalent of 2 minutes of productivity.

Using GIMP is incredibly expensive. It costs way more than $49.99 a month in lost productivity.

GiMP should be looking more and more attractive to professionals as this sort of thing goes.

GIMP isn't even competitive with Photoshop CS2 (you know, the one Adobe has available for free downloading on their website...) It's a joke. Still no support for 16-bit per channel after all these years. (And before someone says that you can't see the difference, that's not the point at all – you need 16 bpc to avoid getting banding and other artifacts after repeated transforms. The final output can be 8 bpc, but editing/processing needs to be done at a higher depth for solid results. And even a $499 DSLR can shoot 14 bpc these days.)

The worst thing about GIMP is that its existence leads the FOSS community into complacency. People need to realize that there really is no good open-source competitor to Photoshop and start working on one, rather than pretending that GIMP fits the bill and then arguing with creative professionals who repeatedly point out why it doesn't.

No. The FOSS community simply realizes that most of the so-called Photoshop users here are just degenerate pirates. They will happily use a pirated copy of something rather than seeing out a true alternative. The license really is quite irrelevant.

There is this single minded brand fixation that makes you wonder if they're all just too cheap to buy Apple products. The mentality is comparable.

Real professionals will probably just bite the bullet. They are already paying for the product anyways.

Not use GIMP, obviously. If a pirated product is better than the FOSS "true alternative", then don't expect much use out of said alternative.

Which is the one thing that the FOSS community refuses to admit. When you put everything on a level playing field -- pirated copies of Windows, Photoshop and Microsoft Office cost exactly the same as Linux, GIMP and Open Office -- people overwhelming choose the pirated versions of commercial products.

I lost patience with Adobe long ago. I know Gimp isn't as good as Photoshop. But it does 98% of the stuff I need to do and it's hard to argue with FREE. Inkscape is coming along very nicely now too. Getting off of their upgrade treadmill is a relief.

Isn't that implemented by the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL) [wikipedia.org], partially implemented in GIMP 2.6 with a migration path that should end with GIMP 2.10 (the next version) fully utilizing it? 2.10 has been specifically noted [libregraphicsworld.org] as supporting 16 (and 32!) bits per color channel. That link, from a year ago, even has a screen shot. Still, 2.10 doesn't have a release schedule, and despite that the developers are committed to "shorter development cycles," it looks more like it's still a ways out (2.9, the dev pre-release, is still several months out at the earliest). Still, it's heartening to know they're on the right path (and that they've gotten around the design flaws that preiviously made this kind of feature impossible to implement).

The worst thing about GIMP is that its existence leads the FOSS community into complacency. People need to realize that there really is no good open-source competitor to Photoshop and start working on one, rather than pretending that GIMP fits the bill and then arguing with creative professionals who repeatedly point out why it doesn't.

Again, GEGL comes to the rescue. The whole point of it is to make it a library so it can be used from GIMP or any other utility. It represents that ground-up rewrite you so desperately plea for.

Regarding a professional-grade tool... Free Software never really offers that. You can get close, and sometimes you get lucky, but for the most part, there is no free ride. Generally, the best you can hope for is a commercial closed-source application that works well in an otherwise Free Software environment. It's icing on the cake when the vendor of such software offers a Free version of it (e.g. Codeweavers and Crossover vs WINE).

There's always "more" work needed, and for high-end items like the Photoshop features missing from GIMP, there's rarely enough community-driven (read: volunteer) time and energy to make it happen. It's worth noting when a major feature is missing, as car mechanics tend not to be racecar drivers (as mentioned elsewhere in the comments), but it's not worth complaining unless you're rolling up your sleeves and/or putting up a bounty to make developers' time easier to allocate.

Graphics people could decide to contribute money to the project and feature requests but coding, don't hold your breath. All of the best graphics people I know couldn't code there way out of a paper bag, no offense to paper bags, some of my best friends are paper bags.

Right. Us photographers and artists are just going to drop into C# and just code our little brains out. Hell, the vast majority of Creative Suite users can't even using the scripting engine much less have a concept on how to code an implementation of CMYK, 16 bit layers or the dozen other things that GIMP is missing.

Professional graphics designers aren't expecting someone to code this for free - who do you think pays for Adobe products? Most people believe there is a market for another Photoshop clone to exist outside the Adobe fence, but nobody has managed to come up with it yet. Not an easy job - dropping tens of thousands of dollars out to make a product that has to be priced below Adobe but have the majority of the functionality. It took Adobe a long, long time to get Creative Suite where it is. Yes, there is a lot of fluff, but the core is awfully robust.

What exactly are they going to use the money for anyway? As near as I can tell they don't have a full time core development team and most of the donations are used to sponsor sending developers to the conference [gimp.org]. If you are going to start working on major changes and new feature sets you are going to need full time staff to work on things which would require full staff.

Hmmm..... so I can take my money (or the company's) and spend it on Photoshop and start using what I need right away and get a tax-deductable business expense as a bonus.

*OR*

I can throw some money at the Gimp project and hope someone steps up to build the features I need at some point in the near future. Hopefully they don't just blow the money on a booth at a GNU/Linux convention. (BTW, $600 doesn't go very far in supporting development of new core functionality)

The graphic designers are just to lazy to do it themselves, instead they demand that you do it for them for free.

There are so many problems with your argument, but I'll just go with this one: The graphic designers aren't demanding that the Gimp devs implement those things. They are just not using the Gimp, and sometimes saying why they aren't using the Gimp.

It's equally as ridiculous to expect graphic designers to go and implement stuff in the Gimp just so that it brings it up to par with tools that alread

I own Photoshop CS6, legally. I will not even consider using Photoshop on a subscription basis because although I am using it for things that I will eventually make money on, I already do not make enough money to justify buying a Photoshop upgrade for $250 every five or six years (three versions) as I currently do. I will never in my life make enough money off of Photoshop to justify spending $240 every year (which is the absolute minimum cost of subscriptions for a single product). And if Lightroom goes the same way, they're gone, too. I prefer Lightroom to Aperture, but not enough to be forced into such an overpriced subscription model.

But it's not just the cost. Even if Adobe rented it to me for $20 a year instead of $20 a month, I still would not consider it. Here's why: I regularly work on projects that span many, many years. One of my projects is well over a decade old, and still in progress. With a purchase, I can still use a copy of Photoshop from ten years ago on an old machine, if I have to. Adobe could go out of business tomorrow, and there's no problem.

With a subscription-based app, if Adobe goes away, my copy of the app stops working. Immediately. Given how badly Adobe has screwed up Flash and Acrobat, I truly do not trust Adobe to still be in business in ten years when the last of the major PDF patents start to expire. Therefore, I cannot trust any DRM scheme in which Adobe ceasing to exist can cause me to suddenly and permanently lose access to everything I'm working on.

And even if Adobe is still around in a decade, there's the problem of Adobe's willingness to continue support. In five years, they could decide that OS X support costs too much, and they could become Windows-only or iOS-only, and I'd be SOL. They could decide that they'll only support each version of the app up until the new version comes out, at which point I'm then forced to do a very painful migration experience three times as often as I currently do. And so on. It just isn't worth it.

To make a long story short, CS6 will be the last version of Photoshop that I will use until such time as Adobe gets bought by a company who has more common sense. In the meantime, I look forward to helping the Pixelmator team improve their software so that it will be capable of opening the handful of my existing documents that it cannot yet handle.

Your (and Adobe's) scheme rests upon the misconception that everyone wants the latest and greatest everything.

I have CS6. If they came out with CS7, I'd probably wait a year (or longer) before buying it, because CS6 does everything I need.

Another thing companies like Adobe forget (Microsoft STILL hasn't learned) is that UI changes SUCK for the end user. I am at maximum productivity and you want to mess up my nuts-n-bolts memory (of how to use the software)? Fark you.

That's the problem. I own Photoshop and use it at least three or four times per month. I need Photoshop because I have to work with all my existing Photoshop files that no other application can open because of the layer effects. I depend on 16-bit-per-channel color to minimize distortion when adjusting the color of photographs as part of complex, multi-layered artwork. I depend on CMYK output because the content I'm producing will eventually go to a print shop that requires CMYK source material. None of the competitors can replace Photoshop at those tasks. Therefore, in spite of the fact that I'm not using it "professionally" by your standards, it is a tool that I cannot readily do without. I'm certain that I am not alone in that regard.

Your cost estimates are too high. Most users don't upgrade all the time. I haven't upgrade for years. The software I have does the job I need. No need to keep upgrading at a significant cost. No need for subscriptions. Adobe is just limiting their market to a smaller group. Most of us won't bother buying or upgrading so that means our kids won't learn to use Adobe's software either. Adobe loses.

I like it. Unless you skip a version or two, the $50/month for the entire suite is a better price.

What you're missing is that the only reason they're implementing subscription pricing is that too many of their customers do, in fact, skip a version or two. Most of those folks will balk at the notion of moving to subscription pricing because it is much, much more expensive.

And even if you don't skip releases, for single products, it is still much more expensive. For a single product (as I use), the minimum

Except there -are- no real competitors to Photoshop when it comes to truly professional editing.

The GIMP is great for hobbyists but for people who edit professionally there is no competitor to Photoshop.

What Adobe is doing though, is they are shooting themselves in the foot with software that is crippled when compared to a pirated version. They're also shooting themselves in the foot if Photoshop stops becoming pirate-able because students/those in not the US, Canada and Western Europe will never e